The Were-Wolf and Others: The Weird Writings of Clemence Housman

• The Classics of Gothic Horror Series
• Edited by S. T. Joshi
• 243 pp
• Paperback: ISBN 9781614983781
• Cover art by Aeron Alfrey
• Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer

The English author Clemence Housman (1861–1959) was the sister of the renowned poet A. E. Housman and the novelist Laurence Housman; but she was a distinguished writer in her own right. In 1890 she published The Were-Wolf, a vibrant exposition of the werewolf motif, in a magazine; it was published in book form in 1896. This novella captures both the terror and the sensuality of this supernatural conception, featuring a female werewolf who exercises a baleful influence on the hapless men she encounters.

In 1898, Housman’s full-length novel The Unknown Sea was published. This rare work involves another seductive female, the mermaid-like Diadyomene, an elusive figure whom a poor fisherman finds on a remote island near his coastal village. On the very borderline of the weird, The Unknown Sea is a rich and complex work written in an archaic and poetic idiom that enhances its elements of terror and strangeness.

The short story “The Drawn Arrow” completes the corpus of Housman’s weird output—an ethereal tale possibly set in an imaginary realm and perhaps influenced by the work of Lord Dunsany.

Housman, an ardent feminist who was jailed for her protests against the denial of the vote to women, is a forgotten master of weird fiction whose work has waited too long to be resurrected. Now we can all appreciate the power and depth of her writings from the beginning to the end of her career.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by S. T. Joshi 

The Were-Wolf

The Unknown Sea

The Drawn Arrow

Laurence Housman’s Were-Wolf Illustrations, by Melissa Purdue

Bibliography

The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.